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First time accepted submitter mooterSkooter (1132489) writes "Magnetic Imaging tools were used to recover a dozen images produced by Andy Warhol on his Amiga computer. I would've just stuck the disks in and tried to copy it myself."
Read more about it from the Frank Ratchye Studio for Creative Inquiry, which says "The impetus for the investigation came when [artist Cory] Arcangel, a self-described “Warhol fanatic and lifelong computer nerd,” learned about Warhol’s Amiga experiments from the YouTube video of the 1985 Commodore Amiga product launch. Acting on a hunch, and with the support of CMOA curator Tina Kukielski, Arcangel approached the AWM in December 2011 regarding the possibility of restoring the Amiga hardware in the museum’s possession, and cataloging any files on its associated diskettes. In April 2012, he contacted Golan Levin, a CMU art professor and director of the FRSCI, a laboratory that supports “atypical, anti-disciplinary and inter-institutional” arts research. Offering a grant to support the investigation, Levin connected Cory with the CMU Computer Club, a student organization that had gained renown for its expertise in “retrocomputing,” or the restoration of vintage computers."

It was farily common, at least among people I knew, for the power supplies to overheat. I believe it was the early units. It would just shut down and we'd stick them in the refrigerator or freezer for a few minutes so we could get another 45 minutes or so out of them.

I've heard of drilling through the potting material to remove and replace a fuse buried in there, but never that. What was the hope behind the refrigeration of the "brick"?

Yes, the C64 power supply was potted -- and after digging through it what had to be replaced wasn't a fuse, it was a 5v linear regulator. The problem with the C64 power supply was that the Linear regulator was designed for 1A, but Commodore was using it to pass 1.2A. This shortened the life of the part, and when it failed it required a huge effort to dig through it to find the part that was bad and replace it.

But I did exactly that. And unfortunately one generally had to do that if they wanted to end up

You apparently never had to put your C64 power supply in the refrigerator.

The C64 power supply used a 5v linear regulator rated for 0.2A - 0.3A less current than the C64 itself drew through it, so the part would have premature failure because it was underrated. Apparently/supposedly the difference was expected to be dumped as heat, and the supply was potted which made it very difficult to get to the part that failed and replace it... but doing so was necessary because the replacement supplies had the same design flaw. I did that replacement and after doing so the power supply l

Exactly what I thought. I would have just tried the disk in an Amiga with a HD attached, made an image and copied that over to try out in an emulator. Magnetic Imaging devices indeed! Well, makes for a more interesting story I suppose.

Those are rare though and hard to find, probably full of dust, and not the sort of thing you want to stick a valuable floppy disk in. (those artists who examine Warhol's work are very careful and treat it all like something amazingly precious, even his old underwear, which I am not making up)

Floppy reading is a destructive process. In a healthy disk, the disk will not be damaged by it. But you could have a disk with the information on it, but not durable enough to be read with a standard disk drive.

I hope your not an archeologist or forensics expert. The first thing to be concerned about, when dealing with a one-of-a-kind artifact, is to minimize any POSSIBLE (not probable) damage. There is a non-zero probability that using a disk drive could cause damage. There is less of a possibility that magnetic imaging would cause damage.

Also, if they did much research, they might have found that one of the few remaining Amiga hardware peripheral producers has for some time sold floppy disk controllers that I understand are popular with Forensics people, as they can read a very wide variety of formats on a standard PC.

Proof-positive that Darwin was right. Natural selection yielded a subset of the species with strong survival characteristics, while winnowing out the weak.

Yeah, even today, I'm terribly surprised and disappointed if any of my Amiga floppies fail while I'm reading them. I suppose I should hurry up and copy them onto a hard drive as image files before something I care about dies.

A modern PC's power supply will burn out long before a 25-yr old Commodore power supply will.

Nonsense. Back in the early 90's I sold consumer electronics for a living, and we did a brisk business in aftermarket and grey market power supplies for various Commodore machines - because the stock power supplies burned out with depressing regularity and stock replacements were expensive and difficult-to-impossible to obtain from official sources.

False, and false. I have toasted many an Amiga power supply, and a number of Amiga chips.

Ditto, by playing around with the parallel port. There were no buffer ICs on the old Amigas to stop bad things happening to the main processor or coprocessors when there were shorts on the external I/O pins.

My (parents') Amiga 500 died half a dozen times from electrostatic discharge. Ultimately we made a mat to sit it on, out of cardboard wrapped in foil and wired to the wall outlet ground. You would spark yourself on the mat before using the computer.

From looking at the "art" it looks to have little artistic value. Warhol didn't have any particular skills in computer art, and the software was quite limited in what you could do at that time. It's nothing that anybody else messing around with the same program couldn't have produced. Just because Warhol is a notable artist, does not mean that every piece of art he produced is worthy of our attention. Some people are great authors, but that doesn't mean their shopping lists or twitter posts, are literary works to be cherished.

There is a reason Warhol decided not to release those images. Saying that this is something other than just a bit of fooling around to learn the tool is an insult.

While not the same situation this reminds me of people trying to analyze literature. If the writer would have intended for you to interpret the text differently he would have rephrased it. To say that the text needs interpretation is equivalent to claiming that the writer was too incompetent to get his message across.

Do you have any idea how many scholars and academics earn their living writing literature and creating works of art for the sole purpose of having other scholars and academics review, critique, and interpret their work, all while getting paid to sell textbooks that they write, and paid to tell students how important those works are to read and study?

By pointing out the lunacy of this system you are endangering an entire sub-culture and way of life. They could have you burned at the stake as a heretic.

A lot of these are from later models, with 24 bit support and higher resolutions. The original Amiga supported only a 64 colour palette from a total 4096 colours, and an additional feature where you could modify the palette part way through scanning to get smooth gradients, but techniques for exploiting this would not have been refined at the time of launch of the Amiga 1000.

A lot of these are from later models, with 24 bit support and higher resolutions. The original Amiga supported only a 64 colour palette from a total 4096 colours, and an additional feature where you could modify the palette part way through scanning to get smooth gradients, but techniques for exploiting this would not have been refined at the time of launch of the Amiga 1000.

Demos that used the Ham modes only did it for static pictures, all the moving parts (which was usually why you watched demos, other then to listen to the music) was done in the normal Amiga modes. So that was usually 32 (OCS) colors to 256 (AGA).

While there can be exceptions, that is generally how the Amiga Demo's are. They were also about pushing the hardware past it's limitations, so if you know of any demos that do higher then 256 colors, let me know so I can check them out.

I wish I had mod points.. but you are dead on, the demo scene was where talent lied, and just look at these 'wharholian' pieces. a copy/pasted eye, the campbell soup can (one hit wonder) done by a drunken 3yr old, and some pasted video capture of him reading the instructions. yawn.

"New York's Museum of Modern Art hosted a Symposium on pop art in December 1962 during which artists like Warhol were attacked for "capitulating" to consumerism. Critics were scandalized by Warhol's open embrace of market culture."

"In 1979, reviewers disliked his exhibits of portraits of 1970s personalities and celebrities, calling them superficial, facile and commercial, with no depth or in

Critics that were contemporaries with the likes of Manet, Van Gogh, and Gaugan were similarly shunned by the establishment. Meanwhile, paintings that hung in galleries and were critically praised at the time are worthless today.

If it evokes an emotional reaction, even if that reaction is contempt, it's art. The worst insult you can hurl at a painter is "gee, that's pretty."

So, you hold a PhD in art history? Or have you ever taken a single entry level art history class?

The first question was sarcasm. I did, in fact, take an art history class in college. Your uneducated opinion of art is as bad as an art historian's knowledge of quantum physics, which is somewhere between "very little" and "absolutely none".

A man once said "Be silent and thought a fool. Speak and remove all doubt."

Art history records many examples of things that were art at the time but are now recognized as junk. Art history is not the same subject as art. It actually includes looking at trends that are stupid in hindsight. Like pop art and photo real paintings.

Art history records many examples of things that were art at the time but are now recognized as junk.

Entirely true. Van Gogh was a failure who couldn't sell paintings. Gaugan and Manet were panned by contemporary critics, while the works that were critically praised and hung in expensive galleries are worthless today.

Warhol has been dead for a quarter of a century. Maybe enough time has passed, maybe not. But these guys who have never had an art history class who think they know what art is are ludicrous.

A boy once said, "The emperor has no clothes!" We see you chose to remove any doubt, with your appeal to authority and putting knowledge and opinion on the same level. You overvalue opinion - your own, and that of professionals in an almost purely subjective realm.

Are we talking about "fully understanding" the *history* of the piece of art, or the artwork itself? Because I can know who painted something, what materials they used, where and when they painted it, but still know nothing about the meaning of the art.

Plus, if you just *ask* the creator what his art means, maybe they'll tell you. In which case, how can we really be said to be "studying" anything? If we had an oracle that just told us how quantum physics works, we wouldn't really need to study that either.

Possibly that's because you're an idiot. Floppies and drives degrade just like everything else and taking these extraordinary measures gives a better chance of not permanently damaging something priceless during recovery attempts.

DiskDoctor was supposed to be an fsck type of thing on the Amiga, only it was unreliable and buggy. That was one great thing about Amiga was that the community created all these great tool that were better than the official or default utilities. The OS kernel was great, but it had some not quite ready commercial programs that went with it and some last minute addons. Still, even the crappy stuff was much better than on the PC.

This is pretty typical of Slashdot, really: technical people with some education second-guessing people who do $THING for a living even though they don't have the same knowledge of the field or the circumstances, but by $DEITY they're smart people and they know things, so they're instantly armchair experts.

This is pretty typical of Slashdot, really: technical people with some education second-guessing people who do $THING for a living even though they don't have the same knowledge of the field or the circumstances, but by $DEITY they're smart people and they know things, so they're instantly armchair experts.

This isn't limited to the technical community. Doctors are pretty bad about this too. Particularly in regard to the field of finance: some of them should practically hang out a "Scam Me" sign. I'm sure there are "Modern Major Generals" in almost any field who feel -- incorrectly -- their own expertise and success in one field should make equally competent in anything.

Then you'd miss stuff like 1-2-3 diskettes and unformatted blocks.
For old crap you really only get one shot at reading it, as it'll all rot away. Best to make the best possible image. And with 6TB disks shipping really what is the excuse?

CMOA? AWM? CMU? FRSCI? Identifying what an acronym stands for is very helpful when the acronym isn't very well known. Yes I know I can read the article and try to find it out, but it's helpful for summaries too.

You've just found an undiscovered work by Andy Warhol. Do you want to:

1. Wipe it down with Pledge(TM)?

2. Call an appropriate professional for advice?

Because I'm pretty sure that . . . "I would've just stuck the disks in and tried to copy it myself" . . . is the physical artifact equivalent of using some randomly chosen household cleaner. And museum curators are pretty anal about curation of their stuff.

I understand they wouldn't use it in this case but I always used Disksalv [aminet.net]. Looks like it is still being maintained and is now freeware. It was one of the only tools at the time that would recover to another disk rather than beat the crap out of the damaged disk while it tried to fix it. I now use ddrescue under linux for recovery but disksalv was way ahead of its time.

Let me see... I last used a floppy a couple years ago and it was basically single-use: wrote data to it once, got it back off once, then Bad Sector City. Most of that 10-pack of floppies was the same way.

Granted "modern" 3.5" floppies are much lower quality than what we had in the '80s but your assertion that floppies never break is stupid.

Andy used to hang around the SVA (School of Visual Arts) cafeteria trying to pick up (male) students.

I was in the film school at the time, so I didn't give a crap about who he was. There was another guy as well back then, Larry Gartel, who also used the Amiga to create digital art. He's obviously not as well known as Warhol, but thems the breaks.

Odds are very high that they where IFF. Commodore created a universal documented format container called IFF back in the day. The Graphics version was completely documented and is evens still supported by a lot of graphics programs.

It was said in the BBC article emulators couldn't load it, and considering GIMP loads IFF, and he had a pre-release Amiga 1000 with unreleased software, it's entirely possible it was from before the Interchange File Format was standardized.

Sure enough, turns out to be the case, paraphrased from the PDF linked above, An older format deprecated by 1990 was called PLBM (PLanar BitMap, compared to the ILBM interleaved bitmaps you might recall as typical IFF). This format is much more poorly (sic) documented.

"According to that document, they were only loadable with a pre-release Kickstart found on one of the disks (the Amiga 1000 booted an early BIOS from ROM and then loaded the Kickstart from disk). Evidently they changed the format before the commercial release."That makes no sense at all. The OS did not have a picture viewer or OS calls to load images from disk. Kickstart was basically just the ROM part of the OS. When launched AmigaOS was not stable enough to put in rom so Commodore stuck in a writeable con

I've had the pleasure of working with the CMU CC for the past several years, broadcasting their Demoparty, Demosplash, on Scenesat the past several years. These guys are seriously passionate about retrocomputing and The Demoscene. They have released some neat Demos for the Apple Lisa and the Vectrex. Good to see them getting some recognition here. They're nice bunch of guys, and the Warhol museum certainly picked the right people for the job, right in Pittsburgh.

Seriously ?
They could have just asked. They didn't have to go to all that trouble to recover the images.
Not only were there backup disks made at the time, but the images were converted and stored as IFF files after the Amiga's launch. I know a few ex-Commodore people who have signed backup disks from Warhol from the training sessions for Warhol, and from the launch itself.
The graphics program he used at the launch was an early beta version. It had a more than a few bugs. Area fill in particular